McIntosh hits a grand winner
STONEWALL BACKS
Blackpool 0, Preston North End 1
THE Blackpool-Preston North End match, which had been the talk of two towns for weeks, was being threatened by a mist creeping in from the sea half an hour before the kick-off.
At two o’clock the north goal was almost hidden from the centre stand behind a thickening grey curtain.
It was, nevertheless, “House full,” as it had been certain to be a month ago. Admission was by ticket only, and the last of the tickets was sold before noon today, all in the stands nearly a fortnight ago, and all the terraces three days ago.
Hundreds were locked out racing in vain from one queue to another after the ticket kiosk had posted a “Sold out” notice
Motor coaches in the car parks - parks which were almost denuded of private cars - had come from Preston, Chorley, Great Eccleston, Morecambe, Lancaster and Garstang.
There were 30,000 on the ground - a capacity attendance - and bells ringing and rattles clattering at the kick-off.
BLACKPOOL: Wallace; Shimwell, Suart, Kelly, Hayward, Johnston, Matthews, McKnight, Mortensen, Buchan (W.) and Munro,
PRESTON NORTH END: Gooch; Gray, Robertson, Shankly, Williams, Horton, Finney, Beattie, McIntosh, McLaren and Anders (H.).
Referee: Mr W, B. Nixon (Manchester).
THE GAME
The mist was falling on this Windless afternoon and lifting again as the game opened at the sort of tempestuous pace inevitable in these clashes.
After Blackpool had won the toss they decided to defend the south goal. In the first half minute Finney menaced this goal, racing past two men as if they were standing still before crossing a high centre which Hayward headed out of the danger zone.
To repel Blackpool’s first raid on the left Gray conceded a coiner. After Munro had stabbed it into the side net, Finney escaped again and crossed another centre which the little outside-left. Anders, hooked over the bar.
It was Finney Blackpool had to watch today. They suspected that weeks ago. They were certain of it before three minutes had gone.
Away raced Blackpool again. Mortensen, after eluding one man, was passing a second as in the raging excitement he was fetched to earth a yard outside the penalty area.
Both men, the centre-forward and Williams, the Preston centre half, required attention before Matthews lobbed into a massed area the free kick which Gooch hit out with a Joe Louis punch.
There was not a lot in it in spite of the fast raiding of both forward lines - little constructive in it, and such a lot of excitement that two men had been cautioned by the referee before ten minutes had gone.
RELENTLESS DEFENCE
McLaren headed backwards into Wallace’s arms in a Preston raid which was not created by Finney - an event in itself - before Blackpool stormed into a compact and, at times, relentless North End defence. They forced another two corners in the process. Repeatedly at this time the ball was reaching Matthews. That was an event in itself, too.
The whistle was being blown repeatedly for tackles. It sounded four times in less than two minutes as the game continued to move fast on Preston’s goal without that goal ever being in grave peril.
When at last a pass reached Finney again Suart, for the first time, got it away from the England forward and cleared to a thunder of cheers from the centre stand. With this right wing forward quiet for a time, not a lot was seen of the Preston front line.
FAST GAME
But up to now it was no classic
Incidents were few in a Blackpool pressure which continued even after McKnight had been hurt in a mid-air collision and gone over the line for attention.
It was one of the fastest games I have seen this season, but no classic in its first 20 minutes.
“Clear anywhere” appeared to be the policy of the Preston defence. Not a raid was allowed to reach anything resembling a decisive conclusion.
Yet Blackpool continued to raid and won another corner after Mortensen had led another of his one-man raids on a massed but not too firm Preston defence.
Shimwell made one great clearance as Finney and McIntosh were deciding which of them should take a pass to shoot past Wallace, but nearly all the time it was the other goal which was being raided.
From another free kick against the battered McKnight, Preston’s goal nearly fell, Buchan heading backwards a free kick from Matthews and causing Gooch to make a big leap to reach it under the bar.
Preston’s first corner came in the 31st minute. It might have given the Deepdale men a 1-0 lead, for Finney, wandering into the inside-left position to take the centre from the flag, hooked the ball only inches over the bar at a great pace.
Repeatedly, Johnston was sending the Blackpool forwards into action. Repeatedly they were being repulsed.
Then the Preston forwards would escape and everything would be repeated in front of the other goal.
It had been the sort of half you expect in these games when nobody, it seems, loves his neighbour as himself, and the football as a result is torn to tatters.
Blackpool had pressed sufficiently to have won the lead but they could find no gaps and force none in North End s stonewall defence.
Half-time: Blackpool 0, Preston North End 0.
Second Half
It was still the mixture as before when this half opened. Any man who held the ball was not shown a shred of mercy.
Attacks were hammered out of shape before they could ever reach range of the goalkeepers. Matthews alone - and he was getting a lot of the ball today - seemed able to escape the do-or-die tackles.
Once he corkscrewed past three men before shooting wide, One of Williams’s clearances sailed high over the cast-side shelter and out of the ground. Nobody could envy the forwards today against two defences who refused to give an inch.
At last, in the 10th minute of the half, came something to write about. For the first time in the match Hayward lost a bouncing ball, and lost McIntosh with it.
On to Blackpool’s goal the Preston centre-forward raced, the goalkeeper alone in front of him. was preparing to shoot as the centre-half pursuing him tackled him desperately.
PENALTY CLAIM
Down went the leader. Up went every Preston hand for a penalty. Mr. Nixon refused it.
Another half-minute and it should have been 1-0 for Blackpool as Mortensen lost a skidding ball in a gaping goalmouth. In less than another half-minute it was 1-0 for Preston.
A great gap unexpectedly Appeared in Blackpool’s defence. A long pass reached it.
Into the open space McINTOSH tore alone, brushed aside one late tackle, and raced on to shoot a great goal wide of the deserted Wallace’s left hand as the goalkeeper came out in desperation to meet him. We had been waiting for a bit of drama a long time. At last it had come.
Afterwards Blackpool began battering again on Preston’s defence, but for a time it was the Preston forwards who began playing at last the sort of open direct football that scatters defences.
McKnight lost one chance, falling to a late tackle with half the field gaping in front of him. From Kelly’s centre, too, Mortensen headed wide as Blackpool began to raid again. But there was no punch in Blackpool’s attack.
OPEN FRONT
It was still Preston's forwards who were making the ball move fast from man to man. They won two corners by the exploitation of this open front.
Blackpool's raids - two or three to every one by the North End’s - were still leading nowhere with 20 minutes left.
It was a nearly nonstop Blackpool offensive in the last 10 minutes, but except when Mortensen headed over the bar at the end of a movement almost inevitably opened by Matthews, the fall of Preston's goal always seemed improbable.
Result:
BLACKPOOL 0
PRESTON NORTH END 1 ( McIntosh 57 min)
Blackpool missed an open goal in the 56th minute of this match. Preston scored a great goal in the 58th.
That is about all there was in it. It would be charitable to forget the first half when, too often, the man was taken instead of the ball and both forward lines were never out of the grip of two ruthless defences.
But after the interval the Preston forwards began at last to play an open plan, releasing their passes fast and as a result not only scored the goal which won but threatened to score another one or two.
The Blackpool front line learned nothing from this lesson. The two inside forwards were too deliberate for a game played at this pace and put too many passes wrong.
From the left wing the ball seldom came back once it went there which, admittedly, was not often.
Mortensen, as a consequence, either waited in vain for a ball which never reached him or battered alone at a defence which no one man could shatter.
Matthews alone had the craft to create positions to split this defence.
But no wing forward, either, could both create positions and convert them.
This was a Blackpool attack without a decision at close quarters.
I rate Johnston as Blackpool’s No. 2 to Matthews No. 1. These two were always playing football and there was not such a lot of it today.
Suart had an infinitely more assured game against that sparkling wing raider Finney than any of his critics had expected.
Blackpool’s forwards had sufficient of this game to have won it. It was left to the Preston front line to show how it could be won.
THE BIGGEST RIDDLE IN FOOTBALL
Matthews is is still not getting the passes
By “Spectator”
IF a theatre combine engaged a top-of-the-bill star, publicised the signing, and, when the show was produced, put him in the chorus, a lot of people Would begin to ask questions - including the shareholders.
That has been happening at Blackpool in the Stanley Matthews, case - and they were asking questions at Maine-road last week.
I talked to several Pressmen and a couple of Manchester United directors after the match, and, without exception, they all wanted to know the answer to the biggest riddle of the football season.
“What,” they demanded, “is the reason for the neglect of Matthews? He’s not had half a dozen passes all the afternoon.”
I could not tell them.
All I could assert with absolute conviction was that there was no conspiracy to starve the England forward out of the Blackpool team, no jealousy of him, no resentment of his fame.
Only a rumour
THAT rumour - the gossip that the rest of the team think he is too often in the headlines - has as little truth in it as the fiction circulating a week ago that Matthews intended returning to Stoke, that already he was discontented with his new club.
I am in sufficiently close contact with the Blackpool players every week to know that the greatest wing forward of his generation, unspoilt, unassuming, as modest a star as I have ever met in the game, is on the best of terms with the other men, who. I also know, are as glad as they ought to be to have such a potential match-winner playing with them.
The average professional footballer will never object to the fielding in his team of a player who can earn him a £2 bonus.
That, to put it on the lowest commercial level, kills the starve - him - out rumour stone dead.
But the fact remains that Matthews is still being neglected, that for minutes on end in nearly every match nobody would know he was on the field if his name were not on the programme.
Manager Joe Smith cannot explain it.
“Before match after match, he said when I talked to him this week, “I tell them to - give Matthews the ball, tell them that once he is given it he can beat his man with it nine times out of 10.
“They know that - and yet few passes still go to him.”
Marked man
THE Blackpool manager’s theory - and it is mine, too, as I wrote weeks ago - is that the outside-right is so closely guarded, has invariably so many men on his heels wherever he moves, that the other forwards and the wing half-backs, too, have an instinctive disinclination to ignore one of the game’s first principles, which is never give a pass to a marked man.
That, I am convinced, is all there is in it. But I am no less convinced that something will have to be done about it. For even Stanley Matthews cannot play football without a football.
In the meantime, chiefly, I suspect, because of the presence in the team of the man who is being stalemated, Blackpool continue to pack them into every ground, even into their own back- street enclosure.
Another sell-out
ANOTHER sell-out is almost certain for the Stoke City visit on Christmas Day afternoon, when, I hear, all the stands are to be booked - 6s. centre, 4s. 6d. wing and 4s. south stands and the south stand paddock, too, at 3s.
And already letters are in the club’s mail by nearly every post about reservations for the Villa match on January 31, the Burnley game on February 28, and even the visit of Derby County on March 26, which is Good Friday.
As, on the following day, Arsenal come to town, it promises to be the sort of Easter which will make the Blackpool board lament again that the famous stadium was not built, when it could have been built with the municipal authority’s co-operation - in those golden days beyond recall before the war.
Jottings from all parts
BY "SPECTATOR" 13 December 1947
NEXT WEEK-IN TOWN TO MEET CHELSEA
WHEN Blackpool were last at Chelsea, where the team play again next weekend, there was a young man in the Press box whose comments on the game were both intelligent and constructive.
When I located him on the back row after the match I found that it was Tommy Lawton.
The Blackpool team’s football impressed him a lot. I am not surprised.
For Blackpool at Stamford Bridge last March played, I think, their best game of the season - and played it, too, on a field of frozen snow which made football one of the higher arts.
It was George Dick’s first game as an outside-left. He celebrated by shooting two goals in the first 10 minutes, thereby persuading one famous footballer who has become a football writer into calling him the answer to Scotland’s left-wing problem.
Willie Buchan and Stanley Mortensen scored the other goals in a 4-1 match, won by this Blackpool team:
Wallace; Shimwell, Sibley, Farrow, Hayward, Johnston, Munro, Buchan CW.), Mortensen, Eastham, and Dick.
Cup draw on Monday
BLACKPOOL will be in the draw for the third round ties in the F.A. Cup in London on Monday afternoon.
The matches will be published within minutes of reaching “The Evening Gazette” office.
So please do not telephone to ask, “Who’re Blackpool playing ?” You will soon know - and, after all, the matches are not to be played until January 10.
Stanley can shoot
“NEVER say again that you can't shoot," I said to Stanley Matthews on the way home from Manchester a week ago.
His six- minutes-from-time shot, taken from nearly 20 yards out, was the best of the game, and would have won the day for Blackpool if the Manchester goalkeeper had not made a master save.
I am surprised that Stanley cannot be persuaded to shoot more often, writes “Spectator” I am still amazed that the Blackpool forwards so seldom give him the ball at all.
Even Mr. Matthews cannot play - or even shoot - without it.
***
First to arrive for today's big game
His face creased in a big smile, Mr. Pat Grogan, of Sunning dale-avenue, Marton, steered his invalid chair through the “players and officials gate at Bloomfield- road at 10-30 am. today, nearly four hours before the Blackpool-North End match was due to start.
TO an astonished groundsman ' he said “I’ve come in plenty of time for the kick-off,” and he was the first spectator to arrive.
Parking his carriage in the invalids’ enclosure, Mr. Grogan settled down contentedly with pipe, book and sandwiches for his long wait.
WOULD’NT MISS IT
"I’m turned 70 and I wouldn’t miss a football match for anything, particularly this one,”
For 17 years Mr. Grogan has been a keen Blackpool supporter. He was an accomplished athlete until he was wounded in the 1914-18 war.
BLACKPOOL declined an invitation to play at Liege in Belgium on Armistice Day in spite of a £1,000 guarantee. “Teams can’t afford these midweek games on the Continent,” said Manager Joe Smith.
Charlton Athletic understudied for Blackpool, crossed the Channel, were beaten 5- 0, and have never won a game since, sliding in the process from sixth to 18th in the First Division table.
“Never again,” says Manager Jimmy Seed. Now he wishes he had been as wise as Mr. Smith.
SOMEBODY said the other day that Hugh Kelly, the Blackpool wing-half, ought to be a good constructive half-back.
When I asked Why?” I was reminded that he served in the Civil Service - at the Ministry of Food up in Scotland - during the war. Presumably he had plenty of “passed to you” practice.
Not such a good joke. I agree, but unless I am wrong this young Scot one day going to be in the best tradition of Blackpool half-back lines - and there are few higher in the land.
WRITING without the book, I would say that the 11-goals match at Deepdale a week ago has not been approached as a goal-riot on the Preston ground since a Blackpool game there in 1929, the first promotion season.
Blackpool won 6-4. Jimmy Hampson scored three of the six goals - one a converted penalty - Percy Downes a couple and Jack Lauderdale, the Scot from Queen of the South, who, when last I met him before the war had a tobacconist’s shop in Coventry, the sixth.
Jock Ewart was in the Preston goal, and the 6ft. forward called Jim McClelland of Middlesbrough and Bolton fame, who was later to come to Blackpool, played his first game for North End.
Their forward line also included George Harrison - he shot one of the goals - who also made the Preston-Blackpool trek later in his career.
WHEN last George Farrow was on Blackpool's transfer list - as he is on it again today - Port Vale were interested.
George was not. So the Vale took Jim Todd, the Irishman, instead, and now, after playing him regularly as a wing-half, are converting him into an inside-forward.
Where will George go now? I shall be sorry if he goes anywhere. He’s still too good to lose.
BEST programme I have seen this season is published by Manchester United.
It has a front page in colour, includes seven pages of gossip, among them an article by Manager Matt Busby, a cartoon - and almost everything also except the result!
HALF A DOZEN letters in the mail-bag this week asking that George Farrow’s transfer shall be cancelled.
I select one letter at random, written on behalf of a few of the Spion Kop fans by Mr. S. Davis, of Condor-grove, who asserts: “Blackpool cannot afford to let him go.
“He is the best right-half we have had since Albert Watson, among the 12 best in the four countries. . .
We hope it is not too late for all differences to be settled.’’
That, I think, is the voice of the people.
***
TWO Blackpool referees in the A Cup-ties today.
Mr. J. Houston was the man with the whistle in the Runcorn-Barrow match - and one of his linesmen was Mr. F. Thurman, of Preston, who was the referee in the Manchester United- Blackpool match last weekend.
One of the linesmen in the Tranmere-Chester tie was Mr. R. Hall.
Congratulations! Both these men are on the way up. And others from this area are climbing with them.
***
THEY all want to see Blackpool nowadays. That amazing 63,683 attendance at Maine-road last weekend - amazing for a 2-15 kick-off - was the highest of the day in the League.
Nearest approach was the 57,690 at Newcastle.
It was the first time that Blackpool had ever played in front of 60,000 people in a match beginning so early in the afternoon.
Kick-offs at 2-15 invariably reduce the turnstile figures by 5,000 at Blackpool and by 10,000 to 15,000 at the bigger grounds.
WEEK in the life of Clifford Robinson, 22 - years - old Blackpool North End outside- left:
Selected to play for his club in the Fylde League.
Signed as an amateur by Newcastle United and selected to play for the United’s No. 1 in the table Central League team.
Selected to play for Nelson on trial.
He played in the end for the United at Gigg-lane, his partner the forward in the news, Ray Bentley.
Blackpool, I hear, have been interested in Bentley, offering a fee and a forward in an exchange in which Newcastle were not apparently interested at all.
THEY think at Manchester that the day is still far distant when the United will be able to play at blitzed Old Trafford again.
But the plan for the new Old Trafford is so ambitious that it promises to be worth waiting for - a stadium for 160,000, costing £100,000, and everybody able to sit down under cover.
They will begin building that luxury palace about the time the foundation stone is laid of Blackpool’s Little Wembley.
And, with or without the permission of Mr. Aneurin Bevan, I sometimes wonder if that will ever happen in the lifetime of this scribe.
SURPRISE
BLACKPOOL were so completely outplayed during one half-hour of last weekend’s game at Maine-road that I was surprised, on consulting Mr. George Sheard’s chart after the match, to find that the total of corners was 8-5 for Blackpool.
Yes, there were 13 corners in this match, which is a total above the average, and only 49 throws-in, which is as far below the average.
Blackpool took 18 goal-kicks and the United only eight.
GEORGE AINSLEY, Blackpool’s first wartime captain, is soon in the wars at Bradford.
In his second game for the Park-avenue club he fractured his right cheek bone - after scoring two goals in his first game and another in this second match.
George is the Peter Cavanagh of football. He could - and may make a name on the halls after he has left football. As an impressionist he is almost in the professional class.
En route and coming back from matches during the war years he entertained the Blackpool coach many times with excerpts from his extensive repertoire.
In the long ago there was another Blackpool player - Forbes, the name, a 6ft. centre-half - who made a name in variety as “The Singing Cobbler” while he was still in football..
I WAS glad to see Henry Cockburn, smallest wing-half in big football since Sydney Tufnell played for Blackpool, revealing nearly all his old confidence again in the Manchester United team a week ago.
In 12 short months Harry passed from England’s team into the Central League at Maine-road. It was a decline completely unaccountable.
Now he has arrested it and is on the way back. Soon, they say, he will be in England’s half-back line again. But there is another Harry - Harry Johnston, the Blackpool captain - who will probably get there before him.
Watching Manchester United - and Blackpool punting three balls about in the pre-match practice at Maine-road last weekend recalled that if was the United’s manager, Mr. Matt Busby, who introduced this fashion to football about a couple of years ago.
Blackpool were the second club to adopt it. Now nearly everybody’s doing it.
***
THEY LOST
THE Blackpool air at this rate will soon be losing its reputation.
Wolverhampton Wanderers were in the town for a fortnight, and in a couple of matches during those 14 days lost at home to Stoke and lost again at Bolton last weekend.
Southport came to town, too. before the replayed Cup-tie, were at the Tower Circus boxing on the eve of the match, and you know what happened to them.
***
DOWN ON THE FARM
Dave Cumming, Scottish international who played 11 years as Middlesbrough’s first team goalkeeper, and has decided to retire following an injury in a match with Blackpool last season, has turned to farm work.
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